Srishti Guptaroy has a knack for turning her own existential crises into funny works of art. If you’re a millennial, young creative or just someone who’s generally unsure whether to laugh or cry at the state of the world on any given day, Srishti’s feed is for you. Using an onslaught of colour and pattern, the Indian artist’s ‘memes’ poke fun at our chronically online existence, sometimes taking on specific Indian pop-cultural references to get her point across. We chatted to Srishti while she was in town for the Adobe MAX conference to learn more.Hi Srishti, you actually studied fashion before going into illustration. How did you end up on the arty path? I grew up in a Bengali family in Kolkata. For us, art and music and dance are almost a rite of passage – it is pretty much mandatory that you be enrolled in some classical art form from when you’re a kid. I was an arty child from then, but like in many traditional Asian families, you’re expected to do medicine, engineering or finance. That seemed like the trajectory for me, too, as I was pretty good at science – I had no real intent of pursuing art as a career.

When I was in 12th grade, somebody told me that there are design and fashion colleges out there. I got into a fashion college in Delhi and convinced my parents to let me go. They said, “You can do this course but after you leave, you have to get a proper, legitimate job.” I was like, “Fine.” Once I left, I got a corporate job working as a fashion designer, but I was making the most generic clothing – just continuously churning out stuff.

Were you still drawing on the side? I was drawing and illustrating on the side and putting stuff up on Instagram, but it wasn’t really getting traction. I thought, “This is a hobby. It’s fine, it doesn’t matter.” But I started doing more digital art and started exploring Illustrator and Photoshop and thought, “This is exciting.”

When did your illustration career kick off? Probably when I started doing things more on the spectrum of humour and relatability. The shareability factor on Instagram is so important; people loved putting my work up on Stories. I also had this epiphany one day where I realised that the screenshot album on my phone was just runway images and memes – I thought it’d be cool to combine these two ideas into something very fun and relatable. In 2019, I was so done with corporate life that I began freelancing. I thought, “If not now, when?”How did you settle on your style? It’s always been there to a certain extent. I’ve always been the person who likes colours, patterns, the idea of ‘too much’. I want somebody to look at the artwork and two days later discover five new things.

Where do you gather your meme ideas? I jot down what people are chatting about at a party or anywhere, really – I just overhear things. I let it come organically; I don’t force myself to make something so I can post it every Wednesday.

Do you workshop your ideas with anyone? Sometimes I run it by my friends, husband or sister. In the last year or so, I’ve noticed that I’m sometimes scared my ideas will offend people. When I started, that was never in my thought process, but somehow now I think, “Oh shit, will somebody feel like I’m saying something inappropriate?” Which is weird self-censoring. So sometimes I ask people, “Do you find this offensive?”

How do you know if an idea is right to pursue? I don’t. Once it’s out there, I let the universe decide.

Do you think digital art is now being taken more seriously? I think so. In the past two years, I feel like people have discovered the possibilities of how much digital art can reach and do. What are the challenges of your medium? Plagiarism is a huge issue. My work has been plagiarised in India innumerable times. People have taken my artworks and made them into backdrops for weddings; they’ve taken artworks and printed them on t-shirts. I wasn’t compensated for any of that, but actually fighting a case or getting compensation from these companies as an individual artist is hell.

Who has been your favourite client to work for so far? It sounds like a cop out, but it is actually Adobe. Since Adobe’s entire range of products is developed for artists and creatives, they have an insane amount of respect and love for us.

What project would you love to work on next? I’m putting this out into the universe: I would love to work with Gucci. They could approach me to design the toilet paper in their store and I’d be like, “Yeah, I’m down with that.”

What’s your advice for young artists? Even if you feel like your art is not at that point where you want it to be (which is absolutely fair – when we start, our skillset is limited but our level of exposure to other people’s work is so high), just start putting it out there. We’re truly living in an economy where you don’t know who will discover your work or when you’ll suddenly be contacted for a project. So just start putting it out there unapologetically.We flew up to Sydney to interview Srishti, courtesy of Adobe MAX. You can now watch Srishti’s delightfully funny and illuminating keynote presentation over here.